Abstract

We present a tool which allows implicit VDM specifications to be used as search keys for the retrieval of software components. A preprocessing phase utilizes signature matching to filter promising candidates out of a component library. The actual specification matching phase builds proof obligations from the specifications of key and candidates and feeds them into a theorem prover. Validated obligations denote matching components. First experiments clearly demonstrate the feasibility of this approach. We thus get a high-precision retrieval tool which helps programmers in locating components which exactly match their needs. Keywords: formal methods, software component retrieval, signature matching, specification matching, theorem proving, model searching. 1 Introduction Effective software component retrieval methods play a key role in reuse. Most methods grew out of classical information retrieval (e. g. [13, 10]) but recently semantic-based methods have gained more attention. As oppo...

Citations